ARE GOP HOPEFULS HOPELESS?

The other day, I read something that lifted my spirits. It was an article by some supposed Republican “think-tanker” (can’t recall his name) who said (complained, in his case) that US President Barack Obama can't possibly lose in the next election, no matter WHO runs against him!

Later, I did some checking (spent a quarter-century as a newsman and old habits die hard) and found out the article in question was a hoax. The guy denies ever having written it, despite the fact that it was all over the Internet under his name.

But I’m guessing it did come from a real think-tank, despite the bogus by-line and is, maybe, the work of some backroom conservative dirty tricks department (you know, the kind that gave us Watergate, the Iran-Contra Affair, and Monica Lewinsky’s presidentially sullied dress, among other things) seeking to prepare its constituency for the worst.

I mean, a number of the reasons this bogus article gave for predicting an overwhelming reelection win for the president made a certain amount of sense:

It said that African Americans would vote “blindly” for Obama. “It’s a race thing,” it said. This is, of course, only a truism, not a truth. It’s obvious that a very large number of African Americans will vote for Mr. Obama on the sole basis of color. He is, after all, the first black president in US history. John Kennedy took about half of the Irish vote in the United States just on the basis of his coming from an Irish immigrant family. And he got still more votes because he was Roman Catholic—the first RC president in the country’s predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant political history. It makes sense. But I doubt Mike Steele, for instance, will be red-rovering to the side of his “African American brother” any time soon, even if former fellow Republican icon Colin Powell indeed did. And Herman Cain is hoping to run against him. So, yes, the President will surely get a lot of black votes on the sole strength of the color of his skin, but not anything like all of them. (After all, the president is half white even if not the half that people see, and there are radical segments in his natural constituency who will vote against him for that reason alone if for no other—just as white supremacists would vote against him if he looked white and were half black).

***

It said that college-educated women would vote for Obama. It added that “though they will be offended by this, they swoon at his oratory.” And went on to say that it was “really not more complex than that.” Once again, truism, not truth and much more complex than that. Indeed, many college-educated women will vote for President Obama, but not because they “swoon at his oratory”. They will do so precisely because they are educated and understand that many of the policies the president is trying to put through—in a process that Congress and the Republican conservative wing are making about as easy as pushing a concrete-filled bank vault up the side of Mount Whitney—are good for the United States, socially, ethically, culturally and in terms of the country’s economic and social future. They are also women who have learned enough to know that the United States must consolidate a liberal process that will allow it to draw back from the brink of tyranny on which it teetered during the eight-year corporate junta led by Dick Cheney—seconded by George Dubya Bush, whom Cheney allowed to sit in the driver’s seat and pretend to be in charge, because…well, who the heck would have voted for Dick Cheney? I mean except for the bozo Cheney mistook for a duck and shot, and who apologized when he got out of the hospital for getting in the way and causing the poor VP all that trouble. (In case you hadn’t heard, the guy was behind Cheney at the time of the shooting, so it was like apologizing to Annie Oakley for screwing up one of her trick shots).

***

But that doesn’t mean all college-educated women will vote for Obama. Just ask Ann Coulter and her waspy friends at Fox News. Or Sarah Palin, who managed to patch together a bachelor’s degree in communication/journalism over a five year period in a series of brief stays at University of Hawaii at Hilo, the Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu, the North Idaho (community) College at Coeur d’Alene, Matanuska-Susitna College in Alaska and the University of Idaho at Moscow—that’s Moscow, Idaho, not the one she can see “from her house”. (Hey, in all fairness, what Palin actually said in her September 11, 2008 interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson —and that comedian Tina Fey picked up on—was, "They're our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska”). Despite her checkered college attendance Palin also won a college scholarship: She got it for being Miss Congeniality (and third runner-up) in the Miss Alaska Beauty Pageant. And she’s certainly not voting for Obama.

***

It said that liberals would vote for Obama, since “he is their great hope.” Well, duh! Probably their greatest hope and America’s greatest hope since John Kennedy, despite the ungodly mess he has inherited and in which he has gotten progressively mired down. But there will be liberals who won’t: the ones who haven’t had the patience to see his policies through to fruition, the ones who expected overnight solutions to essential problems that have been brewing since the Reagan era and that flourished and exploded under the Bush administration’s two terms, and the ones who find he’s too middle of the road for their taste and would like to see someone less ready to seek compromise and congressional consensus.

***

The piece said Democrats would vote for Obama. Geez, ya think?! It added, rather obviously, that “he is the leader of their party and his coattails will carry them to victory nationwide.” Clearly, there are going to be very conservative and very liberal Democrats who are going to wish that they could vote for someone else, and some even might, but most of those probably will just not vote at all, which would be a shame for their party. But, yes, card-carrying Democrats will surely not want to lose the White House four years in (like they did in the Carter era) after sweeping it out of the hands of the Cheney/Bush dynasty (and its continuers) in the last election.

***

The article later claims Hispanics will vote for Obama. Reason: “He is the path to citizenship for those who are illegal and Hispanic leaders recognize the political clout they carry in the Democratic Party.” Well, this is a jingoistic, racist, ignorant thing to say, and if I’m right and this paper has come from an ultra-conservative think-tank, then it just goes to show how out of touch with reality conservative Republicans are regarding this massive minority of nearly 50 million people from across the political spectrum. For one thing, Obama’s immigration policy hasn’t been nearly as liberal as anybody expected, including many of his own co-party leaders. Furthermore, there is no zealot like a converted zealot, and some of the toughest stances I’ve ever heard against illegal aliens have come, precisely, from Hispanics who have gone through proper legal channels, gotten their citizenship and become part of the mainstream North American community. Many of these Hispanics, and many more of their children, who try their best to forget their Hispanic heritage, are as ultra-conservative as any “Anglo” you’d ever want to meet. Particularly so if their families were exiled from communities like Castro’s Cuba, an experience that tends to turn them violently anti-communist and, therefore, way right of liberal. But, yes, many Hispanics will vote for him in gratitude for his defense of civil liberties in openly opposing the kind of police state legislation Arizona has implemented and which some other states have threatened to emulate.

***

The “bogus” story said that Union members would vote “overwhelmingly” for Obama. One can only hope…But in the end, it depends on what “overwhelmingly” means. The fact is that, while his campaigners at Organizing for America immediately showed how anxious they were to give nationwide vent to the union protest movement that took shape in Wisconsin, the administration eventually pulled back a bit from this stance, by making sure everyone knew that the Obama camp saw this as “a grassroots story” rather than a Washington one. And this has placed the president in the midst of a sort of delicate dance (as described by the Huffington Post) with unionists ever since. Nor are workers as enthused as they once were about Obama, since the new jobs he promised are materializing rather more slowly than expected. Still, there’s no denying that the president has a very strong base in labor. And frankly, if you were a union worker and had the choice of voting for Obama or for The Donald, The Huck, The Mitt or Citizen Cain (yet another CEO), what would your choice be?

***

The piece claimed that Big Business would support Obama. Well, yes and no. True, to the utter chagrin of many staunch liberals, it has been on President Obama’s watch that a new rule has come into play, allowing removal of the ceiling on what corporate America can donate to political campaigns, and the president does indeed seem to have an almost carnal relationship with GE and eccentric liberal tycoon George Soros. But from there to thinking that, say, Big Oil, or Big Defense or a lot of other major Big Business segments would ever be anything but conservative Republican is a bit of a reach. Still, perhaps the friends Obama has made in the corporate world will be more than enough to put him over the top in the 2012 campaign.

***

The media, this “spurious” article says, love him. This is a half-truth. Obama had a major honeymoon with the media (well, not Fox News, but, certainly, the serious media) in the beginning of his administration. But he has taken considerable criticism since then, and it’s not like the media as a whole remains “in the tank” for his administration. It is true, however, that the president himself remains something of a rock star. He has charisma. In fact, he and his whole family have charisma and the press loves leaders it can idolize. And come on, admit it, it’s nice having a president that doesn’t make you want to hide you head in a paper bag every time he opens his mouth. Eight years of that was enough already.

***

Finally, the article said that half of all Independents would vote for Obama. Personally, I’m hoping that there’s a greater percentage of intelligent Independents out there. I’m hoping more like 80 percent. But still, according to the story that no one’s claiming, “he doesn't need anywhere near that number because he has all of the groups previously mentioned. The President will win an overwhelming victory in 2012.” All I can say is—as the old Spanish expression goes—may God hear you.

***

Wherever the article came from, you kind of wonder whether there’s not some truth to the notion that the Republicans have seen the future…and they’re not in it. Why? Well, just look at the potential candidates!

I mean, maybe that's why the Republicans are gathering such a list of clowns to run against Obama. As an old rural Argentine saying goes, why waste gunpowder on a buzzard? They're cannon fodder! I mean Gingrich, Huckabee, Palin and The Donald ‘Gump’? Or is it that they really just don't have anybody else? Of course, there's Mitt Romney—wonder what that’s short for, Mittens maybe...like, maybe he was named after George Romney’s favorite cat(?)—who has, at least, an outwardly presidential look. But in some of the latest polls, he's barely tying with Huck Finn...I mean, Mike Huckabee. What does that say about his popularity?

Then there's Cain (maybe they figured that with a little white-out, they could use the leftover posters from the last election). He does have some executive experience: He ran 400 Burger Kings and did such a good job that Pillsbury bumped him up to CEO of Godfather's Pizza. And he's another (though lesser known) Fox News regular, so he's got a foot in the door with the GOP propaganda machine, but so far they're not paying a whole lot of attention to him.

And finally, there’s wild card Sarah Palin. She’s been out making some noise again, so there’s new speculation that she might yet announce her candidacy. She and The Donald have also been courting each other in the media (she talking about his ‘frankness’, he talking about her ‘energy’), so the United States might yet see the horror of a ticket formed by two of the most self-confidently ignorant players in politics. What am I talking about? Here are just a few quotes from the former Alaska governor:

When asked by CBS anchor Katie Couric which newspapers she read regularly, Palin couldn’t think of a single one. Showed how “quick on her feet” she was though, by answering, “All of 'em, any of 'em that have been in front of me over all these years.”

Also in that now infamous 2008 interview, Couric was trying to establish why Palin thought she would be qualified to handle foreign policy. Her answer, “As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where…where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border.”

But then you think, well, maybe she’s wised up a bit in the past couple of years. Alas…At the end of last year, in a radio interview with Glenn Beck (now, we’re talking Fox News, not CBS, these are people who like Sarah Palin and were trying to keep the questions gentle), when asked how she would handle current hostilities between the two Koreas, she blithely danced onto another foreign policy land mine by saying, “…Obviously, we've got to stand with our North Korean allies.”

Of course, The Donald doesn’t lag far behind in the dumbest quotes department. Asked by ABC News about the possibility of his running for the presidency he talked about, what else, money—campaign money in this case— and said, “I mean, part of the beauty of me is that I'm very rich. So if I need six hundred million dollars, I can put six hundred million myself. That's a huge advantage…” In a celebrity interview he once said, “All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me—consciously or unconsciously…” This speaks to his general grip (or lack of same) on reality, I think. And how about this The Donald gem: “In life you rely on the past—and that’s called history.” I mean, the guy makes Dubya look like an intellectual.

One thing you can say for Donald ‘Gump’, though: He has keenly honed diplomatic skills. In a radio interview with star radio and TV journalist Larry King, he once asked, “Do you mind if I sit back a little? Because your breath is very bad.”

Oh, and I almost forgot Christine O'Donnell: She's a declared enemy of masturbation—talk about platform planks(!)—so she's probably lost 99 percent of the male vote (the other one percent is made up of liars) and an estimated 60-70 percent of the female vote before she even gets started! Plus, listen to these gems from Pristine Christine's lips:

"Co-edness is a radical agenda forced on college students."

"We had the ‘60s sexual revolution and now people are dying of AIDS."

"Creationism, in essence, is believing that the world began as the Bible in Genesis says, that God created the earth in six days, six 24-hour periods. And there is just as much, if not more, evidence supporting that." (Huh?!)

O'Donnell/Huckabee or Huckabee/O'Donnell, now there's a ticket ya gotta love! When a Bible-thumping Huckabee was once asked if he thought Jesus would support the death penalty, he said “Jesus was too smart to ever run for public office…that’s what Jesus would do.” He also said he was “pretty sure there’ll be duck hunting in Heaven and I can’t wait.”(He said it to a gathering of the National Rifle Association). Huckabee, who holds a theology degree, also made clear his understanding of science when he claimed that “Darwinism is not an established scientific fact. It is a theory of evolution. That’s why it’s called the theory of evolution.”

I know, I know, they haven't rolled O’Donnell out yet for 2012, but give them time. Everybody who's ever been a Fox News commentator ends up on the campaign list. Well, except for Bill O'Reilly, because he's an Independent. If you don't believe it, just ask him. That’s why he gets 20 million a year to be the star anchor on a channel whose secret logo is a red elephant.

Tearing Down the Wall

Caption: US Border fence at Brownsville (Courtesy Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

The immigration debate is everywhere. Not just in the United States, where it is focused, but worldwide as well. All eyes are on the country, especially now, with Barak Obama as President, to see if it will remain true to its liberal past of freedom and justice for all, to its immigrant history, to its long struggle to impose respect for universal civil and human rights, to its sense of humanitarianism, to the blood with which it drenched its own soil in order to abolish the enslavement of one race by another and to so many other shining examples of its vocation for often hard-fought, but eventually effective self-criticism and for simply doing the right thing, which, surprisingly enough, is also often the most expedient thing as well.

Quite frankly, after eight long and grueling years in which the administration of George Bush (The Lesser) systematically violated, suspended, ignored and banned rights and principles that had always been considered basic to US-style democracy and decency, a lot of people elsewhere aren’t expecting much of us Americans anymore. Worse still, some Americans even had time during the Bush years to get used to the US thumbing its nose at “corny notions” like multilateral decisions on world security, due process, rule of law and respect for human rights, and started almost finding it ‘cool’ for their leaders to talk like Dirty Harry about such things – about smokin’ out the evildoers and killin’ ‘em – which, in their eyes makes Barak Obama “a wimp”.

But hopefully, the current administration – in spite of a jittery economy, a radically hostile opposition, two wars that are looking more and more like an even longer and more pernicious nightmare than Vietnam, the worst oil disaster in the history of the world and a churlishly impatient public that apparently expected President Obama to soar in like Superman and, with a wave of his hand, fix everything that was not just broken, but utterly demolished, overnight – will find the time and energy to go out of its way toward restoring the battered image of the United States as the intellectual as well as material leader of the Free World.

Like it or not, and whatever your personal stance may be, the immigration debate forms part of this context. It has for some time now, but it recently has been shoved to the forefront as a result of the unilateral decision of Arizona to impose its own rules which – despite all of the skewed logic with which the public is being bombarded by far-right commentators – are tantamount to racial profiling.

Clearly, at this moment in its history, the United States has an immigration problem. And it is, for the most part – though not entirely – an Hispanic problem. Let me hasten to say that what I mean by this is that the main problem is in how the United States will deal with the influx of immigrants from that ‘ethnic’ group (whatever that means, since they hail from highly varied backgrounds), and not that the problem is theirs. The problem is, strictly speaking, a US problem.

An Immigrant Nation

The United States is an immigrant country. While the majority of the US population is made up of whites, it cannot really be said that there is anything like a “typical American”. Unless, of course, you are only speaking of those who have descended from the 53 people who survived out of the 102 passengers who left England in 1620 aboard the Mayflower, bound for Virginia, drifted off course and ended up settling in Massachusetts. If not, then the vast majority of Americans are of immigrant stock and, technically, the first settlers were immigrants as well. The fact is that the only authentically “typical Americans” form less than one percent of the population and are not white, but ‘red’. All the rest of us are the descendants of “intruders” – though I am proud to say that some genuine native blood does flow in my veins, thanks to my great-grandfather, Job Cavinder, who was half American Indian.

Caption: My great-grandfather, Job Cavinder, was half Indian. My Great-Aunt Ruth (standing behind Job) demonstrated clear Native American facial features. Seated with Job is my great-grandmother, Mary Landis, and behind her, my Great-Aunt Edith.

But now, this is where our insistence on placing everybody in neat little pigeonholes gets messy and confusing. My wife, Virginia, for instance, is an Argentine national. She was born in South America and speaks Spanish as her first language. Back in the days when we lived in the United States and she needed a visa, she was pigeonholed by the Federal government as “race: Latino”. (Back then, the Federal government didn’t care about the gender concerns of the Spanish language, so for them, there was no such thing as Latino/Latina: immigrants from “south of the border” were Latino Male and Latino Female). In point of fact, however, Virginia is not latina, or at least not in the American sense of the word, which refers to peoples of Hispanic origin. Both of her grandfathers – Mel and Carlucci - emigrated from their native Italy to Buenos Aires, one from Salerno, the other from near Milan. One of her grandmothers was also of Italian descent – Scoltore – her father having emigrated as a boy to Argentina. Hey! Does that mean Robert De Niro is Latino too? Granted, one of my wife’s grandmothers was of Basque descent. So, yes, that part of her family did indeed come from what in the Roman Empire was referred to as Hispania. “See there! See there!” the racial profilers might shout with glee. “That’s ‘Latino’ blood, then…or Hispanic…or whatever.”

Right, so what am I, then? Somewhere way back, part of my family (the Newlands) came over from Scotland, another part from Germany (the Webers and the Leningers), still another part from Ireland (the Cavinders). My paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Henry and the other side of her family were the Hamiltons. So, English, then? But wait: The name Henry, if you check back, is Norman and the Normans were originally Norsemen (Vikings), who settled in France. So, French, then? But then there’s that other part, the British Isles part, what about that? Well, let’s simplify: The British Isles were originally settled by Germanic tribes (Anglo Saxons). And then there’s that other part of my family that’s German and the Norsemen were the originators of the Germanic tribes, Teutonic peoples all. So, okay, if we’re going to racially profile, then I’m Teutonic, right? I mean if I were just now moving to the USA and they wanted to figure out which pigeonhole to place me in, “race: Teutonic”, wouldn’t it be? But wait just a darn minute, now. I get to the States and who do I find there, since…um, forever? My Native American great-grandfather’s maternal family. So what the heck am I doing immigrating, since ‘we Indians’ once owned the place. But then, that racially profiles me too, doesn’t it? Yes, definitely, unquestionably, Teutonic-Celtic-Native American…I think.

We’re All Africa

My point here is that there is no such race as “Latino”. Race is all about skin color – and implicitly profiles people anyway, since there is no race but the human race, with the rest being a matter of complexion and environmental adaptation. Trace us back far enough and, if noted paleontologist Richard Leaky is right, we all started out black, on the plains of Africa. As Shakira puts it, we’re all Africa (waka-waka). This thing of classifying people from ‘south of the border’ as “race: Latino” is just the Federal government’s ‘secret’ code for, “This person speaks Spanish and comes from ‘someplace down there’. Nor should it be an issue in the decision to grant or not grant a visa, since just by placing a race-heading on a visa application, the government is implicitly discriminating by bringing a piece of data into the mix that will permit those making the final decision to decide on the basis of skin color/‘ethnicity’. We are all, then, mixed-race, in a sense…well, except for (if Leaky is right) the purest of African tribes.

The population of Argentina as a whole is a good case in point. Argentina, like the United States, is an immigrant nation, a melting-pot, if you will. Just as in the States the most common ethnic combination is Scots-Irish, English and Germanic, in Argentina, the majority of the population is made up of people of Italian and Spanish origin. Another large segment of the population is made up of people of criollo descent (the mix of Spanish and Amer-Indian bloods). These last are people who would immediately be profiled as “Latinos” because of their dark hair, eyes and complexion, if they were to try to move to the United States. The others would have to speak before their “race” could be determined.

Since Argentina’s history with its natives is much like that of the United States – the Indians were, as in North America, systematically removed, driven out, pushed westward, pursued and slaughtered in order to take their land away and give it to white European settlers – there is only a small pure American Indian population. Most of these people would probably also immediately be considered ‘Latinos’ by US Immigration (and curious police officers in the state of Arizona), since they are dark, speak Spanish and come from “south of the border”. But Argentina also has an eclectic mix of other ethnicities: The country’s quintessential literary figure, Jorge Luis Borges, once quipped: “The Mexicans descended from the Aztecs, the Peruvians from the Incas and the Argentines from boats.” I have known Anglo-Argentines, German-Argentines, Czech-Argentines, Irish-Argentines, Scottish-Argentines, Welsh-Argentines, African-Argentines, Rumanian-Argentines, French-Argentines, Basque-Argentines, Slovenian-Argentines, Austrian-Argentines, Armenian-Argentines, Syrian-Argentines, Lebanese-Argentines, Russian-Argentines, Greek-Argentines, Turkish-Argentines, Japanese-Argentines, Chinese-Argentines, Korean-Argentines, and so on. I am willing to bet that most of these would be profiled as “race: Latino” because of their nationality and language were they to try to immigrate to the United States – with the exception of the “Orientals” (many of whose families have lived for generations in Argentina) since, despite speaking Spanish and having Latin American passports they don’t “look Latino”.

People who are “tough on immigration” but who don’t want to give the impression of being racist will argue that the problem isn’t immigration as such, but the ‘illegals’. (That they are talking about Hispanics is a given). But at the center of mainstream calls for ever-tougher immigration measures in the United States is a fear not just of undocumented immigrants of Hispanic descent or from so-called ‘Hispanic countries’, but also of the exponential expansion of the Latino community in the United States. This segment of the US population has increased more than four-fold since 1970 and is up 22% since the start of the 21st century. Predictions are that by 2050, nearly one in three Americans will be Hispano-American.

The fear that is motivating demands from the fundamentalist right for the deportation of all Hispanic 'illegals' (this is the height of racial profiling) and radical measures to ensure that no more get into the country has little to do with either the lax immigration policies or the shaky border security that they cite. At its core, the issue is about the mainstream white population’s fear of its eventual loss of supremacy.

Parallels with the Past

I'm old enough to have grown up in the so-called civil rights era. I was reared in a predominately (98%) white Midwestern town where there were no blacks. (I see from the latest Census that this has changed: African Americans now form 0.19% of the town’s population – or approximately 18 people out of a total of 9,474). So I can recall hearing the facile racist arguments of white supremacist fundamentalists who, upon hearing of protest marches, riots and other disturbances taking place all over the United States in the 1950s and ‘60s, as blacks sought to back demands that their civil rights be respected, would snarl, “If they don’t like it here, we can always ship ‘em back to Africa.” In many cases, this suggestion was being made about people whose presence in North America pre-dated the arrival of the Mayflower, since African slave labor was already present in the then-Spanish colony of Florida in the mid-1500s. And Dutch slavers first traded African captives to the pre-Mayflower Virginia settlers in 1607. Historically, then, these African people were more American than the European ones who signed the Mayflower Compact. They just weren’t white Americans.

Nor should we forget that during the country’s long immigration history, the push by rightwing fundamentalists to close the gates to certain types of immigrants is nothing new. Today it’s the “Hispanic problem”. Yesterday it was the “Polish problem”, the “Italian problem”, the “Irish problem”, the “Chinese problem”. And the problem has always been a two-way street: people from countries in political or economic turmoil seeking a new home and new horizons in combination with greedy economic interests only too happy to exploit the cheap, sometimes bordering on slave labor that these mass movements of desperate people could provide.

The fact is that many of those who are the staunchest opponents to Hispanic immigration today are the descendants of people who came in droves to the United States and stayed by any means they could a century and a half ago. To hear these descendants tell it today, their families were welcomed with open arms and were respected and well treated because they knew how to appreciate what America offered them and America knew how to appreciate what they had to offer. It’s a nice story, and perhaps there were some cases like that, but generally speaking it is exactly that – a story. The fact is that every new immigrant group has had to carve a place for itself in American society. Typical of mass movements of any kind, the first ones to arrive have quickly staked their claim, fenced off their territory and then tried to keep any new aliens from coming in and messing up a good thing.

The Irish (an ethnic group that today forms about 12% of the US population) are a case in point. Although Irishmen had formed part of the original colonies almost from the outset, the huge waves of Irish immigrants who arrived in the 19th century, and especially during the Great Irish Famine of the mid to late 1840s, arrived in the United States destitute and desperate. They, like many unskilled immigrants from the Hispanic community today, took the jobs that no one else wanted – hard, poorly paid jobs involving grueling manual labor. Notably, they were hired at starvation wages – beggars couldn’t be choosers – to do the grunt work in the building of much of America’s rapidly expanding infrastructure. They dug canals, laid rails, built ports and did any other task where picks, shovels, sledges and a strong back were required. They were often exploited and mistreated. During the civil war, the US government also exploited this wave of largely English-speaking immigration, drafting penniless Irishmen, with the promise of US citizenship, directly off the boat into the Army to serve as new cannon fodder in mounting massive offenses against rebel forces in the South.

As Irish workers building the railroads became more consolidated and banded together to try and form unions, they were unceremoniously cast aside for newly arriving Chinese labor that would work for even less pay. The lot of 19th-century Irish immigrants in the United States was so grim that, following the civil war, they considered the wave of recently emancipated former slaves that migrated northward to be a competitive threat and there are reports from those times of blacks being attacked by Irish-immigrant mobs who beat, clubbed and stoned them. Problematic Irish immigration was, then, also a problem of desperate foreigners fitting perfectly into the exploitative designs of greedy business interests – the same problem as today’s, but with a different ethnicity.

Can’t Have It Both Ways

There appears to be a growing tendency among far-right thinkers today to consider the plight of the undocumented Hispanics as being their problem. It is of little importance to such anti-immigration activists how long these undocumented aliens have been inside the United States. If they don’t have the proper papers, these people say, they should be thrown out at once.

Caption: The Border Fence at Tijuana (Courtesy Wikimedia Creative Commons)

This stance tends to see ‘illegals’ as lawbreakers who have whimsically and maliciously skulked across the border in flagrant contempt for sovereign US authority, so the ostensible solution is to round them up and send them packing. But to look at it this way is an oversimplification of the facts: the fact, for instance, that although it is illegal for them to be in the United States, certain American employers – traditionally in the agricultural and textile sectors but elsewhere as well – gladly hire them at starvation wages; the fact that lax policies in the past tacitly permitted undocumented workers to stay and make a home (albeit humble) for themselves in the USA despite not having a green card; the fact that precisely because they have family members who have lived legally in the States or have been born there, it ends up being, irrationally, next to impossible for them to get permanent residence visas, and so on and so forth.

Therefore, the problem isn't theirs, at least not completely, but a problem that the United States government must address in some more rational and humanitarian way. As for those who claim that cleaning up the illegal immigration problem will create a new problem for the business activities that use ‘illegals’ as cheap labor, I can only say that, first, my heart absolutely bleeds for those shameless and unscrupulous exploiters, and second, that you can't have it both ways. You can’t hire undocumented workers as dirt-cheap labor and then turn around and not want to see them on the street. Nor can you clamor for the cheap goods and services that their labor provides but then expect them not to have a life beyond the fields or the sweatshop walls. This kind of hypocritical double standard is unethical and immoral and is a mindset that should have gone out with the Civil War and, if not, then at least with the advances fought and won in the civil rights era. Because there can be no kidding ourselves: Although they may be paid, if miserably, for what they do, the exploitation of the undocumented status of ‘illegals’ makes them the modern-day slaves of industrialized white America, and it makes their bosses the supremacist slave-drivers of the 21st century.

‘Tear This Wall Down’

Caption: President John F. Kennedy and his entourage survey the Berlin Wall. "Ich bin ein Berliner," JFK declared.

As I am writing this, an image keeps popping into my head of John F. Kennedy standing before the Berlin Wall and declaring: “Ich bin ein Berliner.” I was a boy at the time, but already a thinking, conscious human being and I recall feeling a thrill of excitement and pride at this admirable statesman’s declaration of war on that wall and on the totalitarian mentality on which it was constructed.

Built by the repressive Soviet Bloc in 1961 to separate East and West Germany from one another, the Berlin Wall was the quintessential symbol of the Cold War. But it was also the symbol of the darkest kind of fundamentalism, of an archaic mindset that actually believed that an ideological line could be drawn in the sand and a material wall erected to separate one culture (political in this case) from another, that barbed wire, searchlights and machine guns could keep ideas and advancement from spreading, that harsh repression was a viable way to impose a system or that such repression was sufficient to suppress people’s natural desire for freedom, progress and a better, happier life.

I was a quarter-century older and a politically savvy newsman when an American president again stood before that wall. I was no longer an innocent and had serious issues with this leader, but I still couldn’t help but identify when Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and challenged: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear this wall down.”

Now when I see footage of our border with Mexico, I can’t help asking myself how the same nation that fought so hard, so long and with such sound reason against the ideological more than the material symbol of the Berlin Wall can now be supporting the building of just as horrendous and futile a wall between it and one of its two closest neighbors. A political cartoon is taking shape in my mind that makes me sorry drawing is not one of my strong talents: It shows America’s “Berlin Wall” manned by armed Border Guards along the Río Grande. On the other side of the wall, standing waist deep in water are Mexican immigrants clamoring to come over. On their shoulder stand other immigrants and on their shoulders, still others. A dialog balloon coming from a guard’s mouth says, “We gotta make it taller!” Behind the guards, facing the American side of the wall, wringing their hands, their faces wrenched with fear and worry, are a crowd of white Americans led by Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. A dialog balloon coming from a frightened-looking Beck says “Gosh fellas! I sure as heck hope it holds.” And while all of their eyes are on ‘The Wall’ the tide of change continues with the birth of a million North American Hispanics a year behind their backs.

Caption: A wall of our own, and every bit as futile and odious as the Berlin Wall. (Photo by Omar Bárcena. Courtesy Creative Commons. Public Domain.)

Because this is precisely what’s happening. The point that the anti-immigration (e.g., anti-Hispanic) fundamentalists are too self-obsessed and too obtuse to understand is that building a wall between themselves and the Hispanic world is as idiotic and futile an idea as the Berlin Wall was. While they are desperately seeking to plug the leaks in the illegal immigration dike with their fingers and toes, the inexorable trend toward a changing face (a pan-American face, if you will) for North America continues unabated. There were 9 million Hispanics and North American-born Latinos living in the United States in the 1970s. Today they number over 40 million or about 14 percent of the population. And the current birth rate among the Hispanic community in the United States totals over one million babies per year. This is a trend that isn’t going away no matter how scared fundamentalist white supremacists might be of losing their grip on power.

The worst thing that could happen is that the immigration issue should drive an ever-increasing wedge between the white and Hispanic communities. Should that happen, the future scenario could only be one of increasing tension between the two. The violence, disruptions, riots and bitterness that marked the white versus black integration clashes of the 1950s and ‘60s need to be established as a lesson learned in this respect. The Obama administration has the singular opportunity to take strides toward avoiding this kind of scenario, not by bowing to pressure for a “bigger and better wall”, but by studying creative ways to develop more rational immigration legislation and to take advantage of the extraordinary potential of a multi-racial, multi-cultural America.

The Temptations of Torture

US President Barack Obama has been quite clear as regards his stance on waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques”: He considers them torture, plain and simple, and under his presidency, the United States will refuse to condone torture under any circumstances…period.

So why does the debate continue about whether or not the United States government can or cannot apply torture under certain circumstances (in which, far-right-wing commentators and torture proponents would have us believe, the ends justify the means)? Why do reporters from right-wing news media continue to hound President Obama on the subject, as if his answer to torture required justification, as if he were the one who was somehow unethical for defending the non-use of torture? Answer: Because certain officials and advisers of the former administration, who decided that they possessed the power to throw more than two centuries of American ethics regarding the inalienable and universal rights of Man out the window may now have to answer for their unmitigated arrogance and absence of moral character. And the possibility that high-ranking officials (including former presidents of the United States of America) might someday be called upon to be accountable for the questionable decisions they make, scares the daylights out of the far right. Why? Because the far right believes in central power, in some people’s being “more equal” than others, in certain rights only applying to “people like oneself”. And they had long sought a leader that was less interested in doing what was right than in doing “whatever it took”, a leader who thought that he was above the law and the Constitution, a leader who would give in to the temptations of torture, the temptations of lawlessness, the temptations of the “hanging judge” mentality of the Old West, a leader who felt that the “expediency” of vigilante “justice” was preferable to the preservation of the highest ideals of a nation that was once the shining beacon of individual and collective rights and the worldwide defender of democratic rule.

And they found that leader in the person of George W. Bush, who wasn’t averse to giving the “great unread”, movie-culture masses the fantasy they longed for: the one that says, what if there weren’t any rules and you could do whatever you wanted to the “bad guys”? The fantasy that justifies the actions of the “Dirty Harries”, and the “Rambos”, who, from the silver screen, teach the public that there’s a point at which the law no longer works and you have to take justice into your own hands.

Tyranny by Any Other Name

Most of us have that fantasy at one point or another. It is almost natural for us as individuals to have such fantasies and even for us to occasionally be tempted to act them out by getting mad and getting physical. (I myself, in this sense, do not hold myself up as an example, notorious hothead that I am). But in order for civilized society to function properly, the law and its representatives must be coldly, clearly and objectively above such feelings and the system must be devised in such a way as to ensure that officials, including the President – perhaps even especially the President – act not as individuals, but as the worthy representatives of the law, and the keepers of the morals and ethics of the nation. If not, if it becomes the attitude of the Executive that rules are made to be broken, then mob justice will simply run amok and civilization and rule of law will be such in name only, a caricature cited for effect in political rhetoric, because it is the law that is the framework for civilization and if the law and the ethical standards of a people are only applied “when they are convenient”, then they become nothing more than an expression of good intentions. And, in the end, unless they are systematically preserved as inviolable, their application is only as effective as the individual in charge at any given time. So applied (or not), ethical and legal standards eventually cease to exist. They become obsolete and are replaced by the arbitrary decisions of the powers that be.

There is a name for this state of affairs: It is called tyranny. Here, I speak not from a textbook, but from experience, having lived through a decade of this kind of authoritarianism in Argentina back in the mid to late1970s and early ‘80s. Based on that experience – back in the early days of Bush’s war on terrorism, when Guantánamo first became an issue, and when perhaps the greatest living American statesman, Jimmy Carter, was one of the few people speaking out against the holding of political prisoners without trial on the offshore US base – I had an unexpected clash with a friend, an intellectual for whom I have the highest respect, who is as bi-cultural as I myself am – a sort of reverse of my own experience, his having been born in Buenos Aires and then having spent many years living in New York. In the midst of an otherwise friendly phone conversation, I stated my opinion that what was happening in the United States, in view of the special powers the Bush government had granted itself following Nine-Eleven, had clear parallels with what had happened in Argentina (as well as in Chile and Uruguay, for example) in the 1970s.

To my surprise, my friend couldn’t figure out what I was taking about. Well, I explained, suspension of civil and human rights, detention without trial at the disposal of the Executive Branch, military council’s of war instead of proper trials, the use of coercion and mental and physical abuse to elicit confessions, etc., etc. All of those things that the military junta imposed and that, back then, would have been inconceivable in the USA, were now a part of accepted US policy. What the United States is living through, I said, are the early stages of authoritarian rule. My friend found this funny, crazy even. He laughed. Treated me with the condescension reserved for imbeciles and madmen. It wasn’t like that, he insisted. He lived in New York. He knew what he was talking about. I was “misinformed”. It was just these terrorist guys that they were holding, nothing more. It wasn’t as if the whole system were jeopardized.

Frankly, I was shocked that he failed to see the comparison, since he was an expert in political science. Because the very same arguments were used here in Argentina to justify the abuses of power and sidestepping of the law and of the Constitution indulged in by the supposed “defenders of democracy” that stepped in to “save the Republic” in this country in 1976. And at the time, a very broad spectrum of the public agreed that in order to fight terrorism you had to throw the rulebook out the window. But in the end, it would become clear to the majority of Argentines – although the far right here as in the United States, still clings to the idea of the ends justifying the means – that defending democracy and rule of law by suspending them and applying a greater lawlessness to the battle against outlaws was tantamount to throwing out the baby with the bath water. If a single person’s rights were violated, everyone’s rights were violated. Because if it could be done to one today it could be done to all tomorrow.

The arguments applied by the so-called National Reorganization Process in Argentina for methods that were clearly at odds with international standards of decency and respect for human rights and jurisprudence, as well as with the country’s own Constitution and Bill of Rights, were very much like those quoted by the Bush Administration: the existence of aggression by a “non-Western and un-Christian enemy with ties to hostile foreign powers”, the need to fight fire with fire in the kind of “dirty war” waged by lawless terrorists, the “unfortunate reality” of “collateral damage” in confrontations of this kind, the practicality of applying “extraordinary means”, justified by the greater good of saving innocent lives through “expedient preventive action”, the justification of “extraordinary powers” being assumed by the Executive Branch so as to not “tie the hands” of government in the face of a clear and present danger to “the values and way of life of an entire nation”.

But in Argentina, what this led to, in the end, was institutionalized State terror, in which tens of thousands of people were tortured, most of the time simply to “see if they knew anything” rather than based of any proper intelligence, with the “evidence” wrung from non-person prisoners by means of water torture, electric shock, beatings, extreme humiliation, drugs and so on being used to justify the detention and torture of still other thousands, with this in turn leading to the summary executions of as many as 30,000 people still referred to simply as “the missing”.

At this juncture, when the far-right is very vocally accusing President Obama of being soft on terrorism and of endangering the United States by not doing as the Bush Administration did and pretending that the Bill of Rights and the human rights treaties signed, often promoted and once-championed by the US government are non-binding suggestions rather than inviolable statements of principle, it almost seems ironic that one of the main factors in stopping the slaughter in Argentina was then-President Jimmy Carter’s insistence on respect for human rights among all countries that sought friendly ties with Washington. With what face could the United States have judged any other country’s treatment of suspects and prisoners under the Bush Administration? And as a world leader, is this the face that the people of the United States wish the Nation to have: that of a country that condones torture and is not averse to suspending rule of law for the sake of expediency; that of a country that applies one law to certain of its citizens and another to others, or that is exceptionally lawless and cruel in dealing with its prisoners of war, no matter what their nationality may be. And if this is indeed the image we are willing to accept, then, what will be the extent to which we can express outrage when our own citizens are treated with brutality when captured?

A Case in Point

The question is: Can democracy, constitutionality and rule of law escape unscathed from attempts to “work around them”? Once a rule has been broken, is it ever “hard and fast” again? And if not, if every time a single man (in this case, the President of the United States), decides that a situation warrants a constitutional “time-out”, of what use is the law and democracy as our forefathers conceived it? And if the Executive has the power to switch the legal rights of individuals on and off like artificial light and effective darkness, then what is the difference between that and authoritarianism – indeed, between that and tyranny?

Almost as controversial as the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy is the case of the late Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro (b.1916 - d.1978). Moro was a high-profile Italian politician who twice served as the country’s premier (1963-1968 and 1974-1976). On the ever-volatile Italian political scene, he was the country’s longest serving post-war leader and one of the most important figures in the Christian Democracy Party. He was an intellectual and was considered a skilled and patient mediator.

In March of 1978, members of the Red Brigades communist terror organization kidnapped Moro, demanding the release of jailed terrorist leaders in exchange for his freedom. The government took a hard line making, it clear that it refused to deal with terrorists. Despite appeals from Moro’s family that the government save him by any means necessary, the government maintained its position. In view of the government’s refusal to negotiate, the Vatican intervened, with Pope Paul VI calling on the Red Brigades to unconditionally release the former prime minister. When this didn’t work, the Pope offered to take Moro’s place as the terrorists’ hostage if they would agree to the politician’s release. Nothing worked, and after holding Aldo Moro for 54 days, his kidnappers murdered him and left his body in the trunk of a car parked on a street in Rome.

There is now speculation that, despite the fact that the Red Brigades were almost surely involved in the kidnapping and murder, there was collusion with others who stood to gain from his death, including US and other interests in NATO and Moro’s successor and co-party member, Giulio Andreotti. Moro and Andreotti were from different factions of the Christian Democrats. While Andreotti was strongly rumored to have ties to both the CIA and the Italian and US Cosa Nostra and, as such, to be radically anti-communist, Moro, ever the mediator, saw the advantage of bringing members of Italy’s then-influential Communist Party into a coalition government. According to statements attributed to Moro’s widow, the former premier had received such strong warnings not to pursue this idea from U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (Nixon Administration) that he had, at the time, become frightened and ill and had considered leaving politics altogether. The ties between Moro’s assassination and Andreotti came up in a trial against the Andreotti years later for the murder of yet another politician and for his alleged Mafia ties. Andreotti was found guilty on a prosecution appeal and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison, but the decision was later overturned in a defense appeal, and to this day, the former Prime Minister (now aged 90) sits in the Italian Parliament with the title of Senator for Life.

While interesting and revealing, these facts are not, in themselves, the point. What is germane, however, is that despite the extremely high profile and importance of the Moro abduction and in spite of the political machinations behind it, government and security officials at the time refused to bend the law to fit their political needs. Italy’s staunch pro-human rights stance remained firm despite the formidable threats posed at the time by the Red Brigades on the one hand and the long-standing Mafia on the other. When it was widely suggested that certain political-profiled prisoners’ feet should be put to the coals in order to expedite the investigation and secure the immediate release of the former prime minister, General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa – a ranking officer in the Italian Carabinieri and one of the architects of the country’s anti-terrorist policies and enforcement strategies – is quoted as having responded: "Italy can survive the loss of Aldo Moro. It would not survive the introduction of torture."

Dalla Chiesa himself was murdered along with his wife and driver by the Mafia in 1982. But that didn’t make him any less right about what he said. Although the fight waged by all legal means against the Sicilian Mafia and the Red Brigades brought the assassinations of numerous law enforcement and justice officials, persistent legal action eventually brought the substantial dismantling and stunning debilitation of both movements and the clear strengthening of Italy as both a political power and as a paladin of civilized culture and society.

But Does It Work?

Torture as an interrogation technique is highly questionable, not only from a moral and ethical standpoint but also with respect to its actual efficacy. Here in Argentina false leads gained through torture were, perhaps, the singlemost cause for the subsequent torture and summary executions of other people who were absolutely innocent of any links with terrorism. Torturing someone beyond all boundaries of human resistance while repeating a question or demand obviously begs an answer – whatever answer pops into his/her head – from the torture victim. In Argentina, it was reportedly not uncommon for interrogators to simply repeat, “I want a name! A name! A name!”, while punctuating each demand for a name with a blow from a nightstick, a kick in the ribs or a punch in the face. After long minutes of mistreatment, prisoners would obviously come up with a name…any name: an rival, a casual acquaintance, their landlord, their boss, any name at all that might stop the abuse.

Or in other words, such unsophisticated techniques often lead to bad intelligence. And experienced intelligence agents and military interrogators in the United States are not unaware of this. There is reason to believe that intelligence professionals may well have been bullied into using the techniques by political officers in the Bush Administration, judging from reports that show that more than a few of them have left little doubt that they find torture an unreliable tool for extracting sound information.

In 2005, the New York Times quoted CIA Inspector General John Helgerwon as saying in a 2004 report that the so-called EITs (advanced interrogation techniques) “appeared to constitute cruel and degrading treatment under the [Geneva] Convention” – an international treaty that the United States has waved in the faces of its enemies in successive wars when these foreign powers have mistreated US captives.

Former CIA officer Bob Baer is reported to have told ABC News that torture made for “bad interrogation”. He said: “I mean, you can get anyone to confess to anything if the torture’s bad enough.”

Another former CIA officer, Larry Johnson, who also served for a period as Deputy Director of the State Department’s Counterterrorism Office wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “What real field officers know firsthand is that it is better to build a relationship of trust…than to extract quick confessions through tactics such as those used by the Nazis and the Soviets.”

ABC and other media have quoted CIA sources as saying that certain presumably crucial information extracted from Libyan-born al Qaeda trainer Ibn al Shaykh al Libi through torture ended up being proven false. Al Libi was subjected to the whole battery of progressively harsher “enhanced interrogation techniques” over a two-week period, and finally broke after being waterboarded and left to stand naked overnight in a cold cell, while being periodically hosed down with cold water. The statements he gave under duress where largely the basis for the Bush Administration’s claims that Iraq possessed biochemical weapons and trained al Qaeda members in their use. In other words, his confession was a major plank in the administration’s platform for launching its attack on Iraq. It was later established by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) that Al Libi really had no such knowledge and had only told his interrogators what he thought they wanted to hear – either to purposely mislead them or simply in order to make the torture stop.The DIA said in an official report that the Libyan’s statements were “unreliable”, since he could provide no further details to corroborate his confession resulting from torture.

Justice Where Justice Is Due

President Obama has been criticized for leaving the decision as to whether to try officials who condoned and ordered torture under the Bush Administration to Justice and the Courts.

Hard-line liberals had hoped the President would be an avenging angel, who would swoop down on human rights violators in government and make them pay for undermining North America’s image and substance as a staunch defender of human rights and rule of law. Far right-wingers wanted him to “show patriotism” by intervening and granting immunity to those who permitted and ordered the use of the torture techniques – which they whimsically refer to as EITs.

But in the end, the criticism in both camps is morally, politically and ethically misplaced, since in the hands of Justice is precisely where that decision must lie, not in those of the Chief of State, if Americans’ rights are to be properly protected and tyranny is to be kept at bay.

Obama and the ‘tea-ed off’ GOP

For a lot of people abroad who were following the events of last week in the United States on TV, this whole thing about the “tea parties” held around the country must have been baffling. In fact, with what some Americans themselves know about our history in this day and age, in which vast sectors of the population appear to have developed a virulent allergy to books and reading, it was probably just as puzzling an event to many of them as well. The fact is, however, that the original “Boston Tea Party”, was a brief but very major event in American history, since it constituted a catalytic episode in the run-up to the Revolution against British imperialist tyranny.

Caption: "The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor", an 1846 lithograph by Nathaniel Currier.

The ones who know precisely how important that “party” was, however, are the guys in the Republican Party’s dirty-tricks think tank who organized and promoted it. And don’t give me that bull about how it was a spontaneous outpouring of American anti-tax and anti-liberal sentiment, because I’m not buying it. You don’t get the kind of press this protest got – especially on “fair and balance” Fox news (come on, Murdock, gimme a break!) – if it’s a spontaneous grassroots thing, especially not when it all ostensibly came together “overnight”. And particularly not when they bring out the big guns in prime time to rally ‘round the cause.

Fox and (Dubya’s) Friends.

Take “registered independent” (as he reminds us, ad pukeum) Fox News star Bill O’Reilly, who “doth protest too much” when anyone accuses him of being a conservative lackey, but who, if he doesn’t already have a GOP elephant tattooed on his chest, should really get one, because he clearly got hit in butt with the White House door when ex-President Bush left office and is ticked off about it. Yes, Bill, we can tell. If not, his night-time “news” commentary show, The O’Reilly Factor, wouldn’t keep on defending the Bush Administration tooth and nail every evening, when it’s so obviously a new day in Washington. I means, geez louise, Bill! Get the heck over it! Dubya’s gone home. He’s through. And unless you’re going to stop toiling every single night with all of the rest of the far-right dinosaurs on your show (like your buddy and arch-conservative pit-bull Newt Gingrich) to prepare the groundwork for the next election four years down the road, then maybe you ought to quit insisting about how “independent” you are or how “fair and balanced” Fox is. How can you expect decent, fair-minded folks not to call you (to paraphrase one of your favorite epithets) a “rightwing loon” when you rant and rave like you do every night against the Obama Administration. Especially when the guy who writes your multi-million-dollar pay check each year (Fox President Roger Ailes) was a media consultant for Republican presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush (the elder) – let’s face it, telling three US Presidents, all from the same party, how to meet the press, seems like a trend – before he was recruited from NBC’s cable division by Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdock to create Fox News.

And then there’s Sean Hannity who follows O’Reilly each night with practically the same format as his – bash everyone left of Adolph Hitler – but in this case, with no apologies for being a frothing-at-the-mouth far-right mad dog. Even the Fox News management seems to have thought that Hannity was too right to be “right” and for 12 years created a parody of fairness by running him alongside “Fox liberal” (and I use the term advisedly) Alan Colmes. Colmes’ job was basically to lose every argument and let Hannity bully and dump on him every night, but still, there was a limit to just how insanely far-right Hannity could get without someone saying, “Hey, wait a minute, Sean, get a grip!”

But even the almost comatosely mild Alan Colmes apparently decided a dozen seasons of playing the “straw man” to Sean Hannity’s ruthless attacks was more than enough and this year left the show, according to him, “to make a greater contribution” to the network. If his personal blog, Alan Colmes’ Liberaland, is anything to go by, Alan’s “greater contribution” isn’t going to scare Hannity in the ratings. Topping yesterday’s items was this lead, and I quote:

“Edgar Mitchell, who flew on the 1971 Apollo 14 mission to the moon, says there is extraterrestrial life, and that it’s being concealed by the United States government, among others.”

The story’s legitimate enough, though not original – it has already been on other TV channels as a human interest feature – but is just the sort of thing that promises to keep Colmes’ “contribution” as zanily “liberal” as possible and keep him or anybody else from undermining the apparent intention of Fox News to destabilize and, if possible, destroy the current administration of the United States.

An exaggeration? Suffice it to say that after cheerleading for the “tea parties” for days on end, Sean Hannity last night interviewed former Vice President Richard Cheney and the clear theme of his questioning was “just how dangerous is Barack Obama to the security of the United States and the world?” Cheney, the most dangerous vice president in history, as current Vice President Joe Biden once referred to him, was only too happy to comply in the orchestrated, nightly character assassination that Fox has sought to carry out since Day One of the Obama Presidency. The virulence of Hannity’s attacks is the kind formerly reserved by rightwing commentators only for figures like Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez, openly considered enemies of the United States. But it should be remembered that the person he is attacking in this way now is the overwhelmingly elected Chief of State of his own country, and his intention is obvious: to undermine the presidency of the United States of America. If the shoe were on the other foot, and the person under such virulent attack were George W. Bush instead of Barack Obama, both Hannity and O’Reilly would surely be asking their audiences if the perpetrator weren’t, perhaps, a terrorist and deserving of waterboarding to find out whom he is working for.

But, okay, let’s all pretend we don’t know who’s behind the “tea parties” – like many tried to pretend they didn’t know Nixon was behind the Watergate break-in scandal that ended up costing him his presidency – and just agree that whoever organized them, their purpose was to send out a message of rebellion, with a pseudo-patriotic bent.

The Original Festivities.

The original Boston Tea Party took place in 1773, three years before the 13 original New England colonies declared their independence from Britain and engaged the crown in full-scale war. Details are somewhat sketchy as to the event itself, but not so regarding the context. What it boils down to is that friends of the Court who formed part of the British East India Company – a concern that was long at the forefront of British expansionism – lost some of the tax breaks that it had been receiving under former agreements for the tea they brought into England from abroad. The East India Company did not supply tea directly to the American colonies, but sold it at auction in England to tea merchants who then exported it to the colonies, adding their commissions to the cost. However, when the crown imposed its thirst for greater revenues on the East India Company’s tea trade, it was the American colonists who took the hit for the higher costs that the East India monopoly passed on to the tea merchants.

To add insult to injury, the colonists could buy their tea much more cheaply from Dutch traders, for instance, but the East India monopoly began to lose vast sums of money to these traders from other countries. To get around this, the solution arrived at by the British government, with a nod from King George, was the Tea Act of 1773. This law gave the East India Company a full refund of a 25% tax it paid on the tea it imported into England, while permitting the monopoly, for the first time, to export tea directly to the colonies. This allowed it to cut out the cost of middle men and to better compete with Dutch traders. But to further cripple the competition, the only merchants that could handle tea in the colonies were now crown-appointed colonial merchants in major American ports, with any purchases they made elsewhere becoming tantamount to smuggling. The main fly in the ointment, however, was a tax known as the Townshend Tax that was only paid on tea shipped to the colonies. It was a direct imperial tax on the settlers and was considered discriminatory by the colonists. Those who favored the tax in Britain argued that it was used to defray the cost of salaries paid to British officials in the colonies. If the tax were repealed the risk was that payment of colonial officials would eventually become the responsibility of the colonists themselves and the fear was that the imperial officials’ loyalty would eventually lie with the British Americans who paid them, rather than with the crown. So the controversial tax on tea stood.

The colonists of Massachusetts protested that they had a right to only pay taxes levied by their elected colonial representatives – and this was backed by earlier agreements hammered out with the crown – since, in England itself, they were not adequately and directly represented and, therefore, whatever was dictated in this way was basically tyranny. Furthermore, it seemed to them that they were the butt of a cruel irony since the Townshend Tax paid colonial officials whose very job it was to protect the interests of the crown in detriment to those of the colonists themselves.

And they were not alone in their protests. By the time of the uprising in Massachusetts, demonstrators in three other colonies had already managed to prevent British merchant ships from unloading taxed tea in their ports. But the crown had apparently decided to make a stand in Boston Harbor and Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson was under pressure to keep the protest from succeeding in the influential Massachusetts Colony. Despite his subjects’ fervent requests – and, eventually, heated demands, with angry rallies in Boston where protesters numbered in the thousands – that the tea be turned away from the harbor, the governor refused to be a part of the self-styled embargo and the tea landed on Boston’s wharf, backed and enforced by the governorship.

Hutchinson was obviously out of touch with the depth of sentiment among the colonists he governed regarding actions taken by a Parliament on the other side of the ocean in which they had no direct representation and it was his stubborn refusal to listen to reason that led to the direct action taken by a group of what today would probably be called “terrorists” and “leftwing loons” – especially by “conservatives” of the ilk of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and former Speaker of the House Gingrich.

Details of this action, as I say, are sketchy but it seems that somewhere between 30 and 130 men (…um, what shall we call them? Militant activists? Far-left extremists? Freedom fighters? Enemy terrorists? Far-left loons? Patriots? Pinheads? You call it, O’Reilly…), some disguised as Indians to avoid identification, climbed aboard the ships under cover of night, broke open the crates on board and dumped the taxed tea into the waters of the Boston Harbor.

British demands that the rebel colony pay for the damages were rejected, resulting in a British embargo on trade with Massachusetts until reparation was made. It was indeed a controversial point, and even some people who would later be considered major American patriots, such as Benjamin Franklin, thought such a vandalistic act was going too far and that reparation should be made. But the stand-off between the colonies and the crown over this and other increasingly coercive acts on the part of the British government eventually led to the first shots of the Revolution’s being fired just two years later.

Tea Parties Today.

So what does this have to do with last week’s “tea parties” organized and orchestrated across the United States? In point of fact, nothing. Indeed, it is important here – since the GOP has insisted on making the comparison by shamelessly using an act of rebellion against imperialist tyranny with a tax package passed by the elected Congress of the United States in a desperate effort to clean up the ungodly mess that an eight-year Republican administration left behind – to figure out who’s who in this farcical tableau.

What every schoolchild recalls about the Boston Tea Party is that it was about “taxation without representation”. But what no one knows without in-depth study of the event, is that the accent was on representation. The tax was no more than a symbol of imperial tyranny. What the colonists were seeking by refusing to pay the Townshend tax was self-determination and what the British crown was seeking by insisting on imposing it was authoritarian control over its American subjects. The protests of last week that shamelessly sought to link the Obama Administration’s policies to this historical event were about perceived high taxes. That was never the issue in the Boston Tea Party. In fact, with the passage of the Tea Act, certain taxes were repealed and the price of tea in the colonies went down to such a degree that it became competitive with smuggled Dutch tea. The Townshend tax on the colonists was only 3%. So the protest and direct action were not because of taxation as such, but because of the principle involved. What the colonists rejected was London’s tyrannical decision to impose a tax in which they had no say and from which they derived no benefits. What they were opposing was despotic interference in their internal affairs. The tax was merely a symbol of their enslavement to and exploitation by the crown.

Last week’s protest has nothing to do with anything except the GOP’s whining about losing the election last November and being so soundly trounced by Barack Obama. Typically, rather than seeking to cooperate and help find a consensual solution to a grave crisis that is affecting the nation, the ultra-conservative political machine is busy seeking ways of taking advantage of the situation in order to undermine the authority of the Democratic Administration and further deepen the perception of crisis and chaos, with the aim of weakening the president’s position at every turn and ensuring that he will be replaced by a Republican at the end of his four years. It is an attitude that is unworthy and unpatriotic, but, unfortunately, not unexpected in a group of self-interested, far-right radicals who refuse to admit that the problem, like the bailout itself, started with them and that it is now President Obama’s job to try and fix the overwhelming mess they left behind.